FREE antivirus and firewalls

Free antivirus: AVG Free, Avast, Antivir:
http://www.avast.com/eng/down_home.html (avast)
http://www.grisoft.com/doc/40/lng/us/tpl/tpl01 (avg)
www.free-av.com/antivirus/allinonen.html (antivir)

Free firewall: Zonealarm is highly regarded:
http://www.zonelabs.com
But there are others jst as good, like sygate
http://smb.sygate.com/products/spf_standard.htm
and kerio
http://www.kerio.com/kpf_download.html

Moreover, AVG has an integrated antivirus/firewall offering nowadays, but I don't know if it's free. There's no read advantage of using those different applications from the same manufacturer.

Study, compare and choose one.

Personally, I use AVG and Avast on two different machines, and Zonealarm (Windows 98 and Windows XP firewall, but being behind a router already makes the firewall less important. In fact, the p2p-software my son uses seems to make Windows unstable in combination with my very old version of Zonealarm, so it's routinely disabled without harmful side-effects.

If you now use Norton or McAfee, be aware that those might be DIFFICULT to completely remove. Ask for help here if necessary.

Hope this helps. Others will give their own recommendations.


Kees

I'm using Grisofts AVG and Zone Alarm, both the free versions.

Here is the reply from the scan from the Gibson site. I've done this off and on over the years.

"Your system has achieved a perfect "TruStealth" rating. Not a single packet ? solicited or otherwise ? was received from your system as a result of our security probing tests. Your system ignored and refused to reply to repeated Pings (ICMP Echo Requests). From the standpoint of the passing probes of any hacker, this machine does not exist on the Internet. Some questionable personal security systems expose their users by attempting to "counter-probe the prober", thus revealing themselves. But your system wisely remained silent in every way. Very nice."


I was using Opera when I did this scan.H

'Guess you can't get any better than that.

Pat
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Ad-Aware SE Personal(free) + Spybot Search and Destroy (free)(I check for updates at least weekly)...these are companions and I think they ought to be together.
AVG free (updates automatically) also,CWShredder as a little extra for 'if ever it is needed' and my firewall is Zone Alarm.
AVG also scans on boot.
In the background....I have SpywareGuard and SpywareBlaster-both of which are forgotten as they prevent anything getting into your computer in the first place.I check these for updates monthly or so (only updated-I think 6-12 monthly).
I have Windows 98SE,
Mandy